


something other

by rougeatre



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-10 00:35:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16460096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rougeatre/pseuds/rougeatre
Summary: Here is how it happens...





	something other

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [obscuro_2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/obscuro_2018) collection. 



Here is how it happens:

She wakes up, and everything is the same. Here in her bed with the lumpy mattress, fumbling for the switch on her bedside lamp. No light coming in through the too-thin curtains: it’s winter and with her hours she hardly sees daylight. Eyes open slowly. Oh. Ouch. She drank half a bottle of wine last night, alone in front of the telly. She’s getting too old for that sort of thing really, although at forty-four she should be far from past it. But there it is.

There’s no peck at the window, no coded perfunctory note, hasn’t been since last month. She worries over her contact, thinks perhaps something’s happened. Of course she doesn’t know who her contact is. It might have been any of them, of the few she’s met, or more likely someone to whom she’s never been introduced. Most of them don’t seem to think it’s important to meet her, after all.

She heaves herself out of bed and clutches her arms around herself against the cold. The heating’s packed up (of course) and no one can come and see to it until tomorrow. She slides her feet into her carpet slippers and goes to take her dressing gown from where it hangs on her bedroom door, hugging it to herself as she pulls it on. Then she wanders downstairs to put on some toast and feed the cats.

Eat, then, leave the dishes in the sink and then to the bathroom, trembling gooseflesh skin, hiss in the scalding water and then wonders if she’ll ever manage to get out again. She does. Dress quickly, never fully naked so as not to bare herself again to the frigid air: pulls on her knickers, her stockings and skirt under her dressing gown, then her bra, shirt and jumper in quick succession. She doesn’t wear make-up, hasn’t done since she left the typing pool. Waste of time. So now she only has to hurry down the stairs, pull on her brogues and her winter coat off the hook, bag hanging ready-prepared on the bannister, and out the front door.

It’s a life. Small, yes, but it’s what she’s made for herself. She’ll go to work, she thinks, and there will be two or three new manuscripts waiting on her desk. She’ll have lunch alone at her desk, or perhaps Alex will knock on her door and insist she join them all at the pub. A recent development: she’s old and frumpy enough now to hardly be considered a woman anymore, she supposes. Perhaps she’ll accept, or more likely she’ll decline. She’ll work late, work until the caretaker comes, and then come home to her cats, the telly, the remaining half-bottle of wine.

It’s these thoughts that preoccupy her, the almost meaningless hum of living, as she walks to the underground. And so it barely registers at first when she passes the man in wizard’s robes.

It takes her a moment to understand what she’s seeing. It’s familiar, and then it’s all wrong. What could he be thinking, going about dressed like that at rush hour on a Thursday morning? Without giving herself a chance to think about it she turns and goes after him.

“Excuse me! Hello!”

The man turns to her, uncertain. “Yes?”

It’s too much, too strange, and she steps back without meaning to. “Are you all right?”

“All right?” The man laughs, a little quietly, as though at a private joke. “Yes, I’m quite all right. Thank you.”

At last her incomprehension gives way to irritation. “Then why are you going around dressed in wizard’s robes? Do you think the statute was written up for a joke?”

The man laughs again, this time properly. “But you’re a witch!” He reaches out to clasp her shoulder, and she finds herself frozen. She cannot remember the last time she was touched. She wants to shrug him off, to shout at him, _I’m not one of you!_ But she does nothing. “My dear, I can’t imagine – front page of the _Prophet_ this morning. He Who Must Not Be Named…he’s dead, at last.”

Arabella becomes suddenly aware that her mouth is very dry. She swallows and it’s like thick glue. She could choke on it. “That’s – not possible.”

He squeezes her shoulder, as though they are kin. “It’s hard to believe, I know. Especially – it was a baby, you know. The Killing Curse, it…”

She’s stopped listening. Later she’s not sure how the interaction ends. She thinks perhaps she thanks him, and then turns on her heel and walks away, fast, her bag slamming against her hip. No one thought to tell her. Nothing, not a word. And, just like that, it’s over. All of it. It’s over.

Her mind an empty mixing bowl. Run your finger along the clean edge of it, cavernous nothing. She catches the train to work, pressed up against the doors, pushing through the crowds up out of the station and to the office. She reads through the manuscripts, rejects one, sends the other to the reading committee. She doesn’t go to the pub for lunch, works through it instead, and then through the afternoon, and the evening, until the caretaker asks if she wouldn’t mind heading off. She stares at nothing on the tube home, absently strokes her cats as they rub against her legs when she comes in through the front door. Feeds them, makes a tin of soup for herself, leaves the unwashed bowl in the sink. Then she goes to the fridge, pours the remaining wine into a large glass, and goes to put the telly on.

Here is how it happens:

No one remembers. You’re sat at home and you’re forty-four years old and it’s small, but it’s the life you’ve made for yourself. This. This is it.

She falls asleep on the sofa that night. From outside there’s the distant rumbling of fireworks.

 

The letter comes three weeks later. A large tawny owl, peck on the thin glass. She opens her eyes slowly, head clattering, wine-acid queasy in her throat.

_A job for you, if you would be so kind as to accept. A.D._

She doesn’t hesitate: _Yes_. Yes.

 

The house in Little Whinging is bigger than her house in London was. Sometimes, wandering around it, it feels echoing, strange. The cats didn’t like it at first. Fitzwilliam tried to run away. But now she thinks they’ve settled. At the very least they like the garden. You can get used to anything in the end, she supposes. Here they are, adjusting. Adjusted.

For the first few years nothing much happens. She’s given up drinking now; she did when she arrived. At first it made the evenings seem so impossibly _long_. The days, too, bleeding into one another. Before she got the job at the butchers she sometimes didn’t get out of bed except to feed the cats.

But then a rhythm to it. Mr Grady, the old man who owns the butchers shop, was getting too old to open up in the mornings, and so she responded to an advertisement to take the morning shift. She likes him, anyway; strongly suspects that he's a _confirmed bachelor_ , as they put it once, which, well, she supposes if there was a confirmed spinster then that was what she is. He invited her over for dinner, and now they’ve spent more than one pleasant evening together.

She joins a bridge club. She does her shopping on a Thursday afternoon after work to avoid the rush, and laundry on a Friday. On Saturdays she sometimes took the bus out to the country and goes for a walk, trying to feel like Bronte heroine up on wild moor rather than a slightly wheezing middle-aged woman wandering paths in Surrey. Sundays she does her correspondence. Never anything from Dumbledore, or anyone from the Order. She thinks of the few she met, and wonders what became of them. Only the Lupin boy she knows is still alive (and Black, but scum, he hardly counts). But truly she’s afraid to ask.

So old friends, then. Muggle post, mostly. Her friend Laura and her husband Derrick in America. Her brother Jason, in New Zealand (safe, safe from the war). And when the letters are finished, envelopes addressed and stamps licked, she looks out the window across the street.

It’s not a life, and it’s not what she’s made for herself. But here she is. And if she ever misses the office, the manuscripts, the feeling of people recognising her for what she is ( _intelligent_ , she is, was, though her brain’s congealing like cottage cheese in her skull, that’s what her English teacher at school always said. “She could get into Oxford or Cambridge, if she wanted.” Her mother’s glazed eyes across the table, uninterested, but her own insides pulsing with pleasure), if she misses it then at the very least she’s serving her purpose. And what more can you ask?

The first time she sees Harry properly is in the butchers. Petunia Dursley comes in with the two boys. Arabella feels her heart start to pound, but she smiles at Petunia, who does not smile back, mouth pinched as she makes her order. Only as she takes and wraps it does Arabella chance a glance at him. Her stomach twists. He looks thin, eyes too big in his pale face, clothes pooling off him. He catches her looking and looks back at her, curious. Quickly she looks back to the counter.

“Here you are,” she says, passing the meat over. “Those are lovely boys you have.”

In fact she has not yet looked at the other boy, plump and tall for his age. Now she smiles at him, and he scowls back.

“Only Dudley’s mine,” says Petunia.

“I see.”

Petunia seems to realise that she’s spoken too quickly. “Harry is my sister’s child. She died. In a car accident.”

“I’m so sorry,” says Arabella, looking at Harry as she says it. Again he watches her, eyes wide, but says nothing.

“Come on,” Petunia says to Dudley, taking his hand. Harry looks ready to follow. It’s hard to take her eyes off him. In spite of herself, she thinks it: _the boy who lived_.

“If you ever need a hand,” she calls, realising as Petunia turns that she perhaps sounds too interested. Forces herself to speak more quietly, smiling into Petunia’s suspicious gaze. “If you ever need a hand looking after them, I don’t do much these days. I only live on Privet Drive.”

Petunia only nods, and tugs Dudley away.

 

That Sunday she writes to Dumbledore to tell him of the developments. _Good,_ he replies. _You must not seem an appealing choice, or they will keep him from you_. _I trust you will do what must be done_.

 _I will_ , she writes.

The first time he comes to her house he’s six years old. It’s the other boy’s birthday, apparently. Arabella finds some old cake in the back of the cupboard to try and give him some taste of celebration, but it’s stale and he leaves some of it on his plate. He’s not talkative, and she doesn’t know how to draw him out. She’s never been good with children as it is. In the end she shows him pictures of the cats; dull, dull for her, but she does it. Eventually they sit in front of the television together. Harry watches with a kind of blunted interest, leaning against the arm of the sofa. Unspoken words pound against her sternum. _I met your mother once. I thought she was so achingly beautiful._ She keeps her eyes fixed straight ahead.

Only when Petunia comes to collect him does she slip. “He’s been good as gold, haven’t you Harry?” And then a hand, resting on his shoulder, and the most gentle squeeze. _I’ve got you_ , she wants to say. _I’ll look after you_. But she lets Petunia put her hand on that same shoulder and manoeuvre him roughly away from the doorway.

It’s the closest she’s come to drinking again. She sits on the sofa with the cats and weeps. Could she find the Lupin boy’s address, without it seeming too suspicious? She could write to him, beg him to come and take the boy away. Write to Dumbledore. But he knows, of course. He must know. And so. And so.

 _Forgive me_ , she thinks. _Forgive me_.

 

They ask too much, she thinks, years later. Have always asked too much, of people like us.

 

After the battle she sells the house and takes the first flight she can get to Boston. She’s written ahead to Laura. In the greying light of the airport toilet she looks at herself. _Not past it yet_. No plan, but who needs one, after all? She doesn’t write to Dumbledore. He doesn’t need to know.

Here is how it happens:

**Author's Note:**

> this was going to be a much longer story, which i one day hope to write.


End file.
